Oracle president promises to certify best practice configurations

Santa Clara, Calif. — Charles Phillips, Oracle's president, kicked off Software 2005, an annual event sponsored by venture-capital firm Sand Hill Group, with a keynote address that focused on the future of the software industry, near-term customer issues and, of course, an update on the PeopleSoft acquisition.

Phillips laid out for the audience of about 1,000 C-level executives representing the major high-tech software firms his view on the industry move toward standardization at the application level. The president said that although the old battles such as TCP versus token ring and the use of JDBC drivers are over, the acceptance of Java is still working its way through the industry.

“Traditionally, packaged applications used proprietary stacks,” Phillips said, but Java is now finally becoming the de facto standard for applications, he added. Phillips noted that Oracle is still in midstream in the conversion over to Java for its applications.

“We are halfway there now,” Phillips said.

In addition, the industry is in the midst of standardizing on the expression of APIs with XML, standardizing on Web services, and designing component-based architectures.

Beyond standardization, the next big move in the industry is toward vertical packaged applications rather than horizontal applications.

“Having line of business applications gives us a competitive advantage,” Phillips said, citing the fact that the recent acquisition of Retek gives Oracle domain-specific knowledge in retailing.

The third major direction of the software industry is its move from being process driven to cross-process driven.

“Vendors typically built a general ledger application for the AS/400 or just a payroll application and optimized the data for that one process,” Phillips said.

Now companies realize if they had the same data model across processes the quality of the information would be much higher.

“Data is fragmented,” Phillips said.

Finally, Phillips said because Oracle owns so much of the stack, applications, middleware, and the database, it will intensify its efforts to create best practices around configurations that it will also certify.

“Our customers tell us that they will give up some choice to get a configuration that will work,” Phillips said, pointing out that 94 percent of the company’s support calls are about how to configure changes across the layers of applications.

“Add a patch in Linux and five other things break,” Phillips said.

Phillips also continued Oracle’s endorsement of open source and Linux in particular, noting, however, that it is “not as solid as some of the proprietary Unix platforms but it’s getting there.”

The Oracle president ended his keynote address with an update on the acquisition of PeopleSoft, repeating the company’s promise to support PeopleSoft through 2013.

“One CIO told me his wife hasn’t even committed to him that long,” Phillips said.